A group of police supervisors was to file suit this morning against the city of Richmond and Police Chief Chris Magnus, claiming decisions and comments he made over the past year amount to racism.

The plaintiffs, all black men, went public in December with complaints about getting passed over for promotion, poor job reviews and even allegations of racist jokes from the chief, prompting the city to hire a former president of the State Bar to investigate.

But the attorney for the eight officers said in January that his clients would cooperate only minimally with the city investigation, and that he planned to sue in Superior Court as soon as possible.

“Here we have officers complaining for over a year, and this city has not brought anybody in to do any type of training,” attorney Chris Dolan said Monday. “There has been no effort on the part of the city or the chief to address these issues. He’s told them to drop it or leave.”

Magnus has repeatedly denied making racist comments or engaging in workplace discrimination. He deferred comment about the suit to the city’s legal team.

“The filing of this lawsuit is particularly distressing because the plaintiffs chose to rush into court before the independent investigation of these charges has been completed,” Louise Renne, an attorney representing Richmond, wrote in a statement Monday evening.

“Even when the allegations were originally lodged, the plaintiffs brought them to the press first. They did not bother to inform the city of the specifics of the charges,” Renne wrote.

Allegations range from claims that Magnus gave poor performance evaluations to claims that he cracked overtly racist jokes in front of plaintiffs, sometimes while expressing disbelief for claims brought to him by the plaintiffs about Ritter.

“Defendant Magnus … said the plaintiff Threets, ‘Picture this … Lori standing over Cleve (Capt. Brown) wearing leather boots up to her waist, cracking a whip, saying ‘dance, jigaboo, dance,”” Dolan wrote in the suit.

Many of its allegations focus on Ritter, a white woman, and Magnus’ support and promotion of her. Plaintiffs label her as a racist throughout the suit, claiming that she asked Brown to tap-dance for the entertainment of police executives from neighboring cities at an unspecified meeting.

The suit ascribes racist motive to Magnus’ decision to promote Ritter from captain to one of two newly created deputy chief positions last April, rather than a black officer. Lt. Ed Medina, a Latino man, leap-frogged a rank to fill the other deputy chief position, though the suit does not mention him.

A black officer also challenged Ritter’s 2002 promotion from lieutenant to captain. Retired Lt. Tommie Phillips sued in federal court, claiming that gender bias led former Police Chief Joseph Samuels Jr. to promote Ritter instead of him. A jury found for the city in 2005.

During his 13-month tenure at the department, Magnus, who is white, has promoted more black officers than those from any other group, department records show: six of 13 promotions, including two captains and two lieutenants, including Griffin and Booker.

Between one-third and one-half of the department’s officers are black. Department records show that among command staff members — those ranked lieutenant or higher — 10 of 16 are black, including seven plaintiffs.

But the three highest-ranking officers are not. Moreover, Magnus changed the work that captains do. The jobs were previously less visible and more office-related, supervising the patrol, administrative and investigations divisions.

Under Magnus, each now works as proxy police chief for a different section of the city, responsible for devising solutions for crime patterns, working with the public and managing the patrol.

“I realize the change process within any police department can sometimes involve miscommunication, anxiety, and mistrust. I also believe these are all things that persons of good will can work through together so things get better,” Magnus wrote in a Feb. 21 memo to department staff.

Neighborhood leaders warmly received many of Magnus’ innovations, including the patrol-intensive community policing system in which captains play an important day-to-day role.

One allegation in the suit deals with changes the chief made last winter to the process of selecting detectives for the investigations division, a move he said was intended to address his own concerns that blacks are underrepresented.

Neither of two department homicide teams has included a black detective for at least two years.

The lieutenant supervising the division traditionally had wide discretion in selecting detectives and detective sergeants. In recent years, the department had a difficult time attracting applicants of any ethnicity to the division because of a lack of pay differential and the many late-night call-outs.

In April, Magnus assigned Pickett to supervise investigations, and soon after the police union negotiated a pay differential for detectives. When annual bidding for assignment changes ended in the fall, more officers wanted to join, particularly blacks.

But after the deadline ended for applying for the jobs, Magnus announced changes to the selection process. The chief created a screening panel, where detective applicants tested orally and submitted to evaluation by several department managers, including Pickett.

Magnus said at the time that the timing was incidental, and the process needed to ensure a fair process after so many years of a more subjective system, vulnerable to political cronyism.

But Pickett, and the department’s black officers, viewed the move differently.

“After the applicant pool was reviewed and considered, there was a senior command staff meeting held wherein defendant Magnus … indicated he’d heard a rumor that only African Americans would be selected for these positions,” according to the suit. “Defendant Magnus said he was therefore going to change the process and the criteria to prevent there from being a ‘black out.'”

Some officers on the application list, including Jenkins, filed a grievance, and all of the black officers on the list backed out. While the black officers organization, the Guardians of Justice, never publicly announced a boycott, officers generally understood it was an organized gesture.

“We do not believe that the best way to reform the system is to boycott the selection process,” Detective Kevin Martin, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association, wrote in a Feb. 28 letter to membership.

“Had the POA board known the GOJ members were going to take the course of action they did, we would have encouraged another remedy,” he wrote.

Martin’s letter also sought to distance the union – which plans to remain neutral about the allegations at least until the city finishes investigating – from the Guardians of Justice, which last month took a no-confidence vote against Magnus.

“We believe that for the GOJ to have done this without the knowledge and participation of the full membership of the RPOA constitutes the same discrimination that it has accused the city of engaging in,” Martin wrote. “The GOJ has in fact eliminated two-thirds of the entire rank and file from being heard.”

Recent public statements made by a member of the Guardian’s board about low morale among department minorities have rankled some other groups in the department.

The union took issue with media representations of the Guardians as a labor organization, while officers from other minorities groups were unhappy by comments that the predominantly black organization represented “all minorities.”

Though he did not directly respond to the Guardians’ vote, Magnus sent a letter to the department afterward that discussed the difficulties of implementing change in the department.

“During the past year I have been continually reminded how subjectively different people interpret the concept of ‘fairness,'” Magnus wrote. “What seems obviously ‘fair’ or ‘just’ to one person or group can come across very differently to others.”

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